The Age Awards are around the corner(viewtopic.php?f=66&t=28807&p=427575#p427575). Please post your favourite Myst Online age below. Please, no fan ages. It would be a great deal of help if you stated why it's your favourite.

_________________--------------------Jamie Marchant If I don't respond it's because email notification is down again and I forgot to return to the thread.

If I were to answer the best "all around Age", the puzzle I love most to solve, the story that intrigues me the most, some of the best music, most unique views, and a place I do enjoy playing around in... it would have to be Kadish Tolesa.

There might be others I think are prettier, like the Nighttime Minkata-- but I didn't care for the Minkata puzzle. Some might be easier to solve, like Teledahn; but it's not as mysterious nor intriguing.

Best overall Age: Gahreesen (though I am still easily mistaken on how it's spelt!). It begins as a small mystery inside a stone building, with something rotating around you. Then you figure out your way thrue the corridors, get your KI, explore thrue cracks to find a way to switch on the power. When finally you find the elevator up you are mind blown with the huge outside view of the outside of the first building and the music (that starts when you walk on the first bridge), the Gahreesen Theme, is absolutely lovely. Every time I visit the cavern I feel like going there and just sitting on the bridge and looking at the lush view rotating around.

And then you get to the main building (hopefully after not too many failed jump attempts!). While the activities inside the main fortress are rather limited, mostly due to the Wall being not active, I still enjoy the two conference rooms and the top levels. So many different environments within the same age!

Others:

- Best graphics: First prize: K'veer. That room with the window and view to the cavern - there's no competition! Also I must mention Kadish Tolesa: while the outside forest is a bit blunt, there are several very nice looking places, and I repeatedly enjoy the views around this age.

- Best music: "The Barons Theme" (Sharpers D'ni Office), Minkata ("Badlands" theme) and "Ercana Harvester", that plays around when you enter the factory.

- Best layout: got to be Ahnonay. When you finally realize how the spheres work, it's just huge mind-blowing moment. And finally when you get to see the outside of the spheres (and the fact that you can have two people, and actually see the spheres rotating) is just gorgeous. I can't think how complex building that Age must have been!

Teledahn. Specifically because the puzzles fit perfectly into the 'story' of the Age, making them 100% intuitive. Still a challenge to solve, but you jut just have to look at the details, and you can solve them without help. Teledahn is the only Age I solved without needing a single hint-- which is not to say it's the easiest Age...

- Best graphics

Have to again give this to Kadish Tolesa. There may be a few very pretty spots here and there, gardens or starfields I visit regularly. But EVERY bit of Kadish Tolesa is pretty and interesting, and it's a complex Age with a lot of different and unique areas. Love the moon room!!

- Best music

Hands down, the best song in the whole game is 'Spore me' from Teledahn. Second place goes to the music you hear in Night-time Minkata. "Follow Me" I think it might be called?

- Best overall age

As I said above, Kadish Tolesa - combining the puzzles, the views, the music, the storyline, it all works well together.

- Best layout

I'm still tempted to say the story behind the puzzles makes Kadish Tolesa the best laid-out Age. But if I specifically have to pick something different, I'll say Eder Kemo and Eder Gira.

#1) ours - think about it, almost a third of Uru, including basically all of the public areas, takes place on, or under the surface of, the Earth. There's the cleft, and Ae'gura and Bevin/Kirel, the Great Shaft, Great Zero, K'veer, the pubs... all these sections of the cavern city that are full of lore and history and massive in scope. A lot of the diehard fans were excited about Uru in the first place largely because we'd see these places, that up until 2003 had only been legendary text in the novels, and never shown visually in a game. Many of them have amazing audio too, like the Kadish Gallery area.

#2) Ahnonay - not only is there some awe-inspiring stuff accessible by the end, but the story behind the age is fascinating and the progression through the different parts of Ahnonay is great. It's great to watch it all unfold in front of you. There's some really nice music in places here too.

#3) Kadish Tolesa - beautiful to look at and listen to, substantial, maybe the most iconic part of the game out of the gate with Teledahn as the arguable exception - and logically structured, as others mentioned already.

#4) Teledahn - again, reasonable puzzles that make sense, a lot of interesting places to explore, and a real atmosphere to much of it.

#5) This is trickier to decide what deserves to be up here, but I'll go with Minkata. It's got some real navigational frustrations, and you can frequently get lost, and plenty of vacant space, but the flip side is it is large, the completion of the age as you explore and make actual progress is great, with some strong visuals and wow moments, and the music's really top-notch too.

Honorable mentions - ages that don't make the top five and why for me they didn't:-Eder Gira and Eder Kemo are both beautiful and have some great bits, but the freaking basket thing is a badly executed piece of puzzle design, which in my mind disqualifies Gira from top five... and Kemo doesn't have enough content on its own to match the above listed ages which is why in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst the two ages are lumped together as 1/4th of the core quest. They're not substantial enough individually.

-Gahreeseen has some real insights and good puzzle design generally, a lot of areas to play through, plus there's some reliance on timed puzzles, which is not my preference usually but these ones aren't awful. But it hasn't aged all that well and was not particularly pretty in many places to begin with. The aesthetics are a bit too drab and gray - even the outdoors is a bit dull in some ways - and that monotony visually compares poorly with the more visually striking areas of Uru.

-I feel about the same way with Er'cana, large swaths of 'not all that pretty and not too interesting' punctuated by the occasional beautiful thing. But Er'cana's more brown than gray. The pellets at the end are a waste of time too.

-Delin's beautiful, one of the more appealing ages, but it's way too limited in size to consider. There's simply not much there... and even less in Tsogahl.

-Reziksehv, i.e. the pod age, has variety of views, which is nice, but no real exploration, just windows out into something, and actually solving the puzzle that ties it all together and completing it is pretty tedious. Plus, the Tetsonot pod lacks much of anything interesting.

-Relto's nice. It's pretty seeing an island in the clouds, and the nod to Myst Island's shape is appreciated, you can do a few things with it like change clothing, customize the Relto pages, etc, but it's limited in size, has no actual puzzles, and mostly ends up being a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else with more to do.

-Jalak was intended to be a physics playground where people made games, but not much ever came out of it for most players, mainly because Uru's physics aren't all that solid, and the Jalak interface has only so many good things that can be done in it. This said I'll admit it's also pretty, but sadly very very small.

FOOTNOTE: There are SO MANY AMAZING AGES IN URU, but in the end though, we need to look forward, not back with Uru. Our challenge as a community is to create NEW content, new material that can help Uru thrive for players, instead of endlessly revisiting the existing ages. If any of you are interested in making new ages, good ages with high levels of quality, the sort that can come at least somewhat close to Cyan's standards, visit the Guild of Writers website and start working with Blender & Korman. This fanbase needs more people who are skilled in:-3d art-texture art-music composition and sound effects design-programming...and who are willing to make an effort to make more great ages that are MOULa compatible [even if, realistically, Cyan won't approve most of them due to limited quality.]